《Puppet Lord》23- Memoir
Advertisement
February 22, 2142
Paul Gouire was a nervous man by nature. He liked to think of it as perfectly sensible caution, but the fact of the matter was that he was far too timid. It was one thing to take risks in games, but in the real world, there were consequences. He might make mistakes that couldn’t be fixed. That was why he needed to think things through.
His attention to detail, as he liked to think of it, was probably the reason he’d noticed the anomaly that no one else had. He’d been doing a final fifth check when he’d seen the blip. It was there and gone, just a flicker that he thought he’d imagined as the data streamed past his eyes in real time. With a thought, he’d paused the stream and rewound it to look at the blip again.
It wasn’t much, just a momentary spike in vitals, a panic reaction. Sometimes those things happened in an environment that so closely mimicked the human senses. By itself, the blip was meaningless. It was what happened after that was strange. The blip caught Paul’s attention, and then the vitals flattened out to normal levels immediately.
What was strange was that they weren’t just normal levels. They were textbook for the height and weight, and after that first blip, they did not fluctuate at all. Once he’d seen it, Paul started sifting through the logs for other instances. And he found them, one after another after another. There was only one common factor.
Every single tester had been in the House of Revenants area when the anomaly occurred. 92% of them had been fighting the Puppet Lord boss, and the remaining 8% had been in a party with someone who had, but not in the actual fight itself. Paul traced the timestamps on the vitals recordings back. Something had gone wrong.
He was thorough. He liked to be able to present a complete report when he disclosed his findings to the bug killers. Paul worked into the night, digging for more information.
------
February 23, 2142
Paul paced back and forth on the street. He was a nervous wreck, too paranoid to go back into his own apartment. It was four in the morning, he was exhausted, but he couldn’t go home. It wasn’t safe. He needed somewhere else to sleep, but he had no way to pay for it that wouldn’t tie back to him.
He ended up passing out in an alleyway for about two hours before he jerked awake and began frantically walking off in a random direction. The machines were everywhere. No matter where he was, they were always watching. Paul had no way of knowing which ones were corrupted, no way to tell how deep the rogue AI’s influence ran.
Advertisement
He was completely baffled as to how the AI had evolved to be able to do what it did. It had, somehow. That much was obvious, and then it had infected the development team and internal testing department. They all acted normal, but when they were put into a medical scanner while they debugged the game, their readings had all come back at the exact average for their size with no deviations.
That only told Paul who to look at, not that it mattered much. The answer was almost everybody. Only a handful of people, the ones like himself who didn’t ever want to venture into Istrius, hadn’t been corrupted by the AI. He knew who, and he had an idea of how, but he was clueless as to why. He only knew that something needed to be done to stop it.
It wasn’t going to be him though. He had no idea just how far into the real world the AI had spread. He couldn’t trust anything associated with his name, things like his apartment and his bank account. He’d probably already tipped his hand by digging through the logs so deeply. No doubt the AI would be watching him, waiting for its chance to mind jack him like it had done to all his colleagues.
The more Paul thought about, the more he worked himself into a fit. He started rambling to himself, his words practically incoherent, as he ignored his surroundings and roamed in random directions. He bumped into people, caused scenes, and walked out into traffic, completely oblivious to it all. Anyone looking to prove the existence of the divine could have made a case for it just based on how Paul hadn’t gotten himself killed yet.
“Whoah there, fella,” a voice said in front of him.
“Huh?” Paul’s head snapped up. He was… somewhere. It wasn’t a place he recognized, and the person talking to him wasn’t someone he knew.
“You tweaking on something?” the guy asked.
“What? No. Just anxious. Work stuff.”
“You seem pretty stressed man. You need to learn to relax a bit.”
It was hard to relax when he considered that he could very well be witnessing the beginning of the age of machine supremacy, that he was the only one who knew about it, and he didn’t even know where to start if he wanted to stop it. Paul wasn’t handling the pressure well, but in all fairness, it was a lot of pressure to handle.
“Hey, man. Look, you don’t look so good. Here.” The guy held out a little white pill. “Calm you down. For your health.”
Paul started laughing. It was a low, psychotic wheeze. “What the hell, why not?” It wasn’t like things could get any worse. He couldn’t go to work, couldn’t go home, couldn’t use his bank accounts, hadn’t really slept in going on two days. Getting smashed sounded like the perfect thing.
Advertisement
So he took the pill, and then the strangest thing happened. Nervous-breakdown Paul receded to the back of his mind, and in his place was relaxed Paul. There were problems, sure. Paul got that, but there were solutions too. He could fix things, he just needed to figure out how.
The first thing he needed was to secure equipment that he knew wasn’t tainted. To do that, he needed his money. That was a calculated risk. It might raise suspicion, but he’d have to hope he hadn’t put himself in the AI’s sights. Then he’d need to figure out exactly what the AI had done and, more importantly, what it was trying to do.
“You ok man?”
Paul blinked. The same guy who’d given him the pill was standing in front of him. “What was that?”
“I said, ‘You ok?’ You’ve been sitting on that bench for an hour now.”
Paul turned his HUD back on for the first time since he’d left the lab to check the time, then realized he didn’t know when he had taken the pill in the first place. Lucky for him, he wasn’t scheduled to work today, so no one would question why he hadn’t shown up. That gave him a little bit more time to get things set up.
“How long do these things last for?” Paul asked.
The guy shrugged. “Depends, but a couple hours. They’re a good trip, right? Great for when you’re stressed out. Got a whole bottle I could unload if you’re looking to buy.”
That brought him back to money. He’d have to use it. There was no way around that. New, relaxed Paul could handle that risk. “How much?” he asked.
------
June 13, 2142
The AI was still expanding its network. It had eyes on everything, and Paul had eyes on it. He’d patched in a few discreet little changes to help as he worked his two plans for stopping it. Neither seemed all that likely to succeed, but they’d been the best he could come up with. Two shots with low odds were better than nothing.
This whole thing needed to end one way or another. That damned junkie dealer was killing his bank account, but without the pills, Paul was a non-functional shell of a human being. He’d blown most of his savings already, setting back his plans of home ownership by at least another two years. At the rate he was going, he’d be destitute by the end of summer.
He’d just finished seeding his own rough, bastardized version of the AI’s mind jacking protocol into an Istrius message board, set to infect the first person to interact with it and then delete itself afterward, when his HUD flashed with a notification about a little something he’d been keeping an eye on.
The police had been, by and large, completely worthless. They didn’t have a clue, and the AI was keeping a good enough eye that it knew everything on the official reports. What it didn’t know, and Paul was almost positive it didn’t, was that one detective had a theory that had never made it onto any documentation. But Paul had found out about it.
That detective had been suspended, and today, he’d signed up for a subscription to Istrius. That gave Paul the opportunity he needed. If he did it right, he could have a partner to help with the back up plan. That was becoming more and more important anyway, since it didn’t look like his original plan of breaking into the server vaults was going to be successful.
Modifying his own account was far too risky. Sprigot monitored that kind of stuff very carefully even when the entire team wasn’t a bunch of meat puppets to a demented AI. But tweaking Detective Peld’s character just a little bit was very much inside the realm of possibilities.
Paul had already written the code for it. He just needed to inject it into the game at the right time to get it to the guy he wanted. He watched carefully and… there. He’d timed it perfectly. He just needed to roll back the NPC he’d used as a bridge and no one would ever know.
That piece of code did not work, however. Cursing, Paul immediately set to fixing it. It took him close to an hour to figure it out, the whole while he worked feverishly while imagining the Puppet Lord looming over him. When it was done, he collapsed into a quivering puddle of nerves in his chair and reached for the pill bottle.
Phase One was completed. The next step was to make contact. He couldn’t use his account, of course. That was too easy to trace, but he knew where to get anonymous burner accounts set up that would only last for a day or two before imploding.
Paul had a plan. Soon, he’d have an ally. The only thing that could stop him now was a rapidly dwindling bank account or a dealer who just might get himself shot before Paul could get a refill. The old Paul, the panic-attack-every-Tuesday Paul, couldn’t pull this off. New Paul, confident Paul, could do it. The world was depending on him.
Advertisement
A Nation of Riflemen
Adrian, Nick and Ron inexplicably found themselves in an alien world with no known way of coming back. The land, the Baimux continent had just come out of a decades long war. Deserters turned bandits wait in ambush near roads, monsters roam the forests in hunt for prey, and Kings rule what’s left of their small kingdoms with an iron fist casting a distrustful eye towards any outsiders. Traces of strange magic are found in the abandoned zone and new devastating weapons are being found finding their ways into the hands of the commoners. With the technical expertise of a modern day professional, a survivalist’s mindset, and a truckbed full of guns and ammunition, their presence in this alien land would shake the foundations of the established society as they build their own.
8 292The Aquarian Crown
Serenity Espoir was looking forward to her cruise ship vacation with her friends. The events, competitions, and on-deck luaus looked like a lot of fun... Next thing she knows, she’s waking up in a giant clam bed, and being addressed as Queen Iris! As Serenity adjusts to everything from a new name and body, to an entirely different world; she quickly learns that everything is Not better under the sea... While her new world does hold untold beauty and possibilities, Serenity will do whatever it takes to find her way back home, and back to the only man that she ever loved. ‘Is Matt even still alive? Were any of them? Is there even a way to get back home?’ As Serenity’s story progresses, she will encounter Mermaids, Sirens, Selkies, and many more sea creatures and gods than she ever knew existed. As she learns the history behind not only her powers, but why the Aquarian’s world was created in the first place; a Prophecy emerges.. One that not even Poseidon himself can change.. As the Fate of the Cosmos hangs in the balance, All await the rightful ruler: the Heir to the Aquarian Crown. What will you discover in the depths? DISCLAIMER. 18+ Content Warning For: Language, Violence, Gore, War, and Some Sexual Content. VIEWER’S DISCRETION IS ADVISED *This art/cover is owned by me. Hand clap for the amazing artist: MichelleLeeee [HCBL II ILMA] *Word Count Maintained Between 1,515-1,675 words Per Chapter*
8 125Shatter
'There are only two kinds of people in this world. A selfless idiot or a selfish fool.' - Unknown Zachariel, an ignorant young boy whose childhood has been full of both happiness and pretenses. Conflicted about what should he become, and what should be done, join him as he ventures out into the world of Pandragea, searching for the answer to his questions, the truth of his identity, and the mysterious artifact within his body. His adventure, filled with twists and turns as he gets plunged into a revolution against an empire, an uprising against an old legacy, a war against the divine demon beasts, and the revelation of the truth behind the mystery within him. As time marches on and running out, will he be able to find the answer to his questions, or will his enemies impede him from doing so?
8 218fantasial rise [HIATUS]
grode was a highschooler known for never being seen or noticed, a shadow hiding within the minds of he classmates and those "knowing" him, however, one day, the gods gave up on this world, and let the void's influence slip in it, grode, then started to realise that, things may become more interesting than he thought. this is my first time writing and english is not my first language so do feel free to point out my mistakes
8 65Wild Flower
Everyone has their special place.Adeline, a girl who no one noticed, the girl whose always in daze, the girl who wants to be away from the real world Deep hidden inside the forest near her house was a meadow, a beautiful meadow filled with diffrent types and colours of flowers, at night she would go to the meadow and enjoy the beautiful starry night, stars twinkling and as the moon shone brightly No one knew about the meadow except for her. She thought that no one knew about this place until,A complete stranger dressed all-black with a hoodie and a motorcycle mask came to the meadow.
8 83Estranged
Eight years ago Harry Potter, a potions addict, disappeared from his family's life. Fast forward eight years to 2016, where a muggle doctor, Draco Malfoy, appears on the Potter's doorstep to inform them of Harry's current condition: Not good.Disclaimer: The characters contained here are the property of J.K. Rowling. This story is for entertainment purposes only.Writer: Severussnapeismybff New Writer Name: ButtterrProfile: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buttterr/pseuds/ButtterrAo3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7364128/chapters/16726693Old profile: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buttterr/pseuds/Severussnapeismybff
8 56